Life and how development changed it

Wow. This is going to be my last post. I can´t believe how fast 9 weeks of personal development went by. I say personal development because I learned a lot about my interests and the opportunities in our fast changing world. I introduced you to several inventions on the web and tried to evaluate them: facebook, Second Life, Fiverr and lots of other interesting things I  learned about, too.

By introducing you to all these little tools of our everyday life I tried to point out that our life is full of opportunities and definitely different to that from previous generations. We are the generation Internet.

Last weekend I have been to a really amazing festival. We had lots of fun, listened to great music and lived without any connection to the outside world. Well, I enjoyed that for three days, but after that I could not wait to get connected to the Internet again and check my facebook. It is part of my life and will always be. I have to admit.

Trash TV and other disasters

Last week I saw the final show of Germany´s Next Topmodel. I expected an interesting show with lots of fun, interesting guests and good entertainment. All I got were boring comments from the host Heidi Klum who wore an awful outfit. (Well, I know I have talked about her before, but she seems to be really important for the German TV culture). The show was boring, without any intelligence and I waited without any success for only one tiny highlight. This happened during prime time when one usually is expecting high quality entertainment.  How can that happen? Why is the most interesting aspect of the show the never-ending commercial breaks? But not only Germanny´s Next Topmodel is like this, also other shows like Daniela Katzenberger´s documentation of her life don´t contribute anything to the cultural education of our country.

Firstly, TV means making money and people seem to butcher it more and more. Breaks for advertisements every 15 to 20 minutes are not rare and during shows like “Deutschland sucht den Superstar” there are short commercials offering the newest mobile phones. Commercials seem to have a big impact: In 2010 Tv commercials had a business volume of $ 180 billion. Indeed the commercials fund the shows and we can watch them for free, but often they are really distracting.

Secondly, people offering TV shows produce what the target group wants. That makes sense. However, very often it turns out to be trash TV. After a long day of working people do not want to watch movies where they have to use their brains. All they want is to watch a light show where a mid-20 blond girl gets her nails and breasts done.

5 bucks and you are in…the world of Fiverr and Co.

I am sure a lot of you guys have the same problem I have: lack of money but still so many wishes to fulfill. I would really like to travel to Spain this summer, but have not enough money for a flight. So what can we do? Well, we could start to work in a restaurant or at the movie theatre. That is what most students do. Work  two days a week and there you get be the money. However, the Internet again offers unexpected possibilities for every situation.

Did you hear about Fiverr before?

Well, I did not know it until I was searching for an easy possibility to make money.  Fiverr is about services. Everybody can offer a mini-service to be fulfilled for 5 bucks. The offers are really variable: There are people willing to translate texts from one language into an other, others offer a wakeup call and even others want to send you a postcard from Thailand. It seems to be really funny and interesting, sometimes a little bit crazy, as there are offerings to get rid of a girlfriend on Facebook. Crazy world. 😉

But how does it work in real life? First, people make an offer on the web. The persons that are interested in a service pay 5 $ via PayPal and receive the service.How do the operators of Fiverr make profits? They keep 1$ of each transaction. The service provider gets 4$. Therefore the operators are definitely interested in many transactions, they can make huge profits. Welcome to the online money machine. How do I as a customer choose among various offers? People are as always able to evaluate others. So if a provider has a lot of good feedback, he might be able to make some money.

Mind Mapping

As it was our task to do some brainstorming concerning our interest in combination with IT, this mind map was the result.

Blogging Expert?!

Blogging – what do you really know about it? What is a perfect blog? Is there a perfect blog? You include a great deal of your personality, your opinions, and your ideas! You upload it on the Internet where everyone can read it. Are you prepared for the responses, for criticism? What if people say that your work is absolutely ridiculous and meaningless?

Questions I asked myself before I wrote my first blog post. How to chose a topic, which interests others and also me? I had to dig deep and was evaluating alternatives. A lot of ideas came up, but nothing convinced me completely. As a first step I tried to structure all my thoughts and ideas by creating a mind map:

The Bloglink Odyssey

There’s always one bad thing about every creative writing assignment: You have to find a topic. To be honest, to me this process is an old enemy. Glad to have finally found one for the first blog, I am now confronted with a new problem: What to write in the second post? And how to stretch that subject to a length of about 12 entries?

Of course my first idea was to continue that political participation thing. Okay, running up Google; searching for things like “politics online”, “taking part in politics” and similar stuff. Dry topic. Tough to find more stuff for other case studies. Besides it is quite hard to imagine that somebody in the course would stand another 11 examples of online political participation without falling asleep. So the next idea was to become more general.